"The shutdowns would affect 30,000 students, almost all in kindergarten
through eighth grade and most now attending poorly performing schools in
African-American neighborhoods on the South and West sides where
enrollment has sagged in recent years,” reported the Chicago Tribune

.As we reported last week, nearly 90 percent of the students in the closed schools will be Black. The proposed closings contrast to citywide data, where only 41.7 percent of CPS students are Black. "This is definitely a race and class issue," Wanda Hopkins, education
coordinator of the South Austin Coalition Community Council, told
EBONY. "We’re fighting this."

The neighborhoods affected most by the closings are escribed by the Chicago Sun-Times as among the city’s "poorest communities." These are also among the city’s “most violent neighborhoods” and hard-hit by gang violence, as reported last week at EBONY.com.

Chicago has become the epicenter
of national discourse over gun violence, though the sympathy and horror
alloted to victims of mass shootings in Aurora and Newtown evade the
city. Black youth have been hardest hit: "More young people are killed in Chicago than any other American city," notes the Chicago Reporter,
a local investigative journal. From 2008 to 2012, "more than 530 youth
[were] killed in Chicago with nearly 80 percent....on the city’s South
and West Sides."